Wednesday, September 1, 2010
In the Boston Globe, here's Dan Wasserman's take, a day after Hamas brutally murdered four people and hundreds of Palestinian Arabs came out to dance in the streets:
Yes, that's right, once again the story line is that Bibi is the obstacle to peace, and that the potential end of a construction moratorium in places where Jews already live is the only problem that needs to be overcome. I mean, just have a look at this picture. Innocent Abbas. Abbas cannot control Hamas, cannot keep them from murdering Jews in Judea and Samaria, won't stop the incitement in his own media, refuses to compromise on any issue, had to crack down on his own people and defy other Arab leaders just to sit in the same room with the Israelis under pressure from the US...but it's Bibi that's the problem. Forget the mindlessness of the thing, a day after a roadside murder that ought to have a clarifying effect on the matter, Tinkertoys on the table is what's in your brain to draw cartoons about? This isn't just rotten analysis, it's an obsession.
We could be charitable to Wasserman and assume he submitted this one before yesterday's events became known, but then that should have engendered a desperate call to the editors to hold the presses. It might have allowed him to appear simply a block head rather than something worse.
No excuse, however, for Isabel Kershner and Mark Landler of The New York Times. Here's a beauty: Killing of Israeli Settlers Rattles Leaders. We can expend the bulk of our outrage (though by no means all) in the first paragraph:
The killing of four Israeli settlers, including a pregnant woman, in the West Bank on Tuesday evening rattled Israeli and Palestinian leaders on the eve of peace talks in Washington and underscored the disruptive role that the issue of Jewish settlements could play in the already fragile negotiations...
Again with the settlements! Seriously? This brutal, planned murder underscores the role of Jewish settlements? Are you serious? It doesn't underscore the militant death culture, refusal to seriously negotiate, and basic lawlessness that permeates Palestinian society? I hope Obamacare includes free Prozac for "news" people, since I detect a serious untreated OCD epidemic that's crying out for relief.
A bit later:
...The Palestinian Authority also condemned the attacks, which occurred just before its president, Mahmoud Abbas, met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. A Palestinian spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the attack by Hamas, the authority's rival, underlined "the need to proceed quickly toward a just and lasting peace agreement," which he said would "put an end to these acts."...
As though the PA can negotiate peace on behalf of Hamas!
More:
...Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement, "We condemn this operation, which contradicts Palestinian interests and the efforts of the Palestinian leadership to garner international support for the national rights of our people."...
Tactics, but no morality. A negotiating stance, but no real condemnation. This is the best the much loved (in the West, and in the West only) and much vaunted Salam Fayyad can produce.
These press fools need to stop doing politics on behalf of the Administration and start reporting the news that's right in front of their faces.
More on this from Soccerdad: The "cbm" imbalance, Elder of Ziyon: Fayyad's fake condemnation, and Phyllis Chesler, who notes in a piece entitled Seeing Red: Jewish Blood on the West Bank, Its Portrayal in the Western Media:
Four young civilians: human beings, fathers, mothers, one of whom was also pregnant, collectively the parents of seven children, were brutally gunned down by armed, masked terrorists. Their murders were openly celebrated in the streets by their attackers and by thousands of their supporters.
You would think that the world would recoil in horror--or that those who report the news, world-wide, would do so. Think again. These four precious souls were Israeli "settlers" and, as such, have already been so demonized that they are now seen as having provoked their bloody, pitiless deaths.
First, they came for the settlers. Then, they came for the secular Israeli pro-peace demonstrators in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv. And then they came for....you and me...
Indeed. I have often said that the demonization of Israelis throughout the Arab and Muslim Worlds has gone to such a height that they are geared up to do something awful and on a mass scale, while the demonization within the European media has gone to such lengths that they are gearing themselves up to accept it. I'm sorry to say that it's clear that The New York Times and The Boston Globe have joined that chorus.
Update: More along these lines, and about the murders:
CiF Watch: Rabbis for whose human rights?
Eight words. That's all the compassion, for the 4 murdered Israelis and their families, that Israeli NGO, Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), felt they could muster, in a 92 word press release, before pivoting to their major concern - the possibility that Israelis may take reprisals. RHR also warns darkly of the possibility that such sinister settlers may even uproot Palestinian trees (Oh, the horror!)...
Fresno Zionism: What Hillary Clinton does not understand
And Seraphic Secret with a must-read: The Murder Process. From whom, these important images:
More from Barry Rubin: Terror Attack Near Hebron: Not An Incident But a Revelation About What's Happening
And Daniel Greenfield gets right to the point: There Will Be No Peace
...Terrorism does not exist because there is no peace process. Terrorism exists because there IS a peace process, or a possibility of one. Hamas murdered five Jews because it wanted to make a point to all the parties that it could not be ignored. At other times it is Fatah that has done the same thing. Israel's willingness to negotiate stimulates terrorism like nothing else, because it creates a tangible reward. Without the peace process, terrorism would fade away on its own. As it had become a fading problem, before Clinton and Rabin plucked Arafat out of obscurity and gave him a country to play with. Paradoxically as long as the peace process holds out the possibility of victory for the terrorists, there can be and will be no peace.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The New York Times and Boston Globe: Never Let a Quadrupal Murder Shock You Out of Your Story Line.
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[The following is a guest post by Anna Geifman.] Today is the last day of Shiva for Yitzchak and Tali Imas, an Israeli couple gunned down by terrorists on August 31st while driving home to Beit Haggai, a small town... Read More
In contrast to the few words (begrudgingly) offered for the victims of this terror ambush, note the Hebrew at the bottom of their picture:
Yitzhak and Takia Ames, H.Y.D.
The initials at the end are not the usual Z.L. ("zichronam levracha", may their memories be a blessing), but H.Y.D. -- "Hashem yinkom damam", God will avenge their blood.
Harsh words... but for a family shattered by this, a premeditated cold-blooded multiple murder just to make a political point, I think those words are appropriate indeed.
DiB